Colony, Nation, and Globalisation


Book Description

The literature of Malaysia and Singapore, the multicultural epicentre of Asia, offers a rich body of source material for appreciating the intellectual heritage of colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Focusing on themes of home and belonging, Eddie Tay illuminates many aspects of identity anxiety experienced in the region, and helps construct a dialogue between postcolonial theory and the Anglophone literatures of Singapore and Malaysia. A chronologically ordered selection of texts is examined including Swettenham, Bird, Maugham, Burgess, and Thumboo. This genealogy of works includes colonial travel writings and sketches as well as contemporary diasporic novels by Malaysian and Singapore-born authors based outside their countries of origin. The premise is that home is a physical space as well as a symbolic terrain invested with social, political and cultural meanings. As discussions of politics and history augment close readings of literary works, the book should appeal not only to scholars of literature, but also to scholars of Southeast Asian politics and history.




Rethinking Colonialism


Book Description

Historical archaeology studies once relied upon a binary view of colonialism: colonizers and colonized, the colonial period and the postcolonial period. The contributors to this volume scrutinize imperialism and expansionism through an alternative lens that rejects simple dualities and explores the variously gendered, racialized, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Colonialism is not a phase in the chronology of a people but a continuous phenomenon that spans the Old and New Worlds. Most important, the contributors argue that its impacts—and, in some instances, even the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus—are ongoing. Inciting a critical examination of the lasting consequences of ancient and modern colonialism on descendant communities, this wide-ranging volume includes essays on Roman Britain, slavery in Brazil, and contemporary Native Americans. In its efforts to define the scope of colonialism and the comparability of its features, this collection challenges the field to go beyond familiar geographical and historical boundaries and draws attention to unfolding colonial futures.




Empires of the Mind


Book Description

Prize-winning historian Robert Gildea dissects the legacy of empire for the former colonial powers and their subjects.




The Economic History of Colonialism


Book Description

Debates about the origins and effects of European rule in the non-European world have animated the field of economic history since the 1850s. This pioneering text provides a concise and accessible resource that introduces key readings, builds connections between ideas and helps students to develop informed views of colonialism as a force in shaping the modern world. With special reference to European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Asia and Africa, this book: • critically reviews the literature on colonialism and economic growth; • covers a range of different methods of analysis; • offers a comparative approach, as opposed to a collection of regional histories, deftly weaving together different themes. With debates around globalization, migration, global finance and environmental change intensifying, this authoritative account of the relationship between colonialism and economic development makes an invaluable contribution to several distinct literatures in economic history.




Mountains Beyond Mountains


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[A] masterpiece . . . an astonishing book that will leave you questioning your own life and political views.”—USA Today “If any one person can be given credit for transforming the medical establishment’s thinking about health care for the destitute, it is Paul Farmer. . . . [Mountains Beyond Mountains] inspires, discomforts, and provokes.”—The New York Times (Best Books of the Year) In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life’s calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Tracy Kidder’s magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interaction of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease. Profound and powerful, Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes people’s minds through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.” WINNER OF THE LETTRE ULYSSES AWARD FOR THE ART OF REPORTAGE This deluxe paperback edition includes a new Epilogue by the author




Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

This innovative and lively book is quite unlike any other introduction to postcolonialism. Robert Young examines the political, social, and cultural after-effects of decolonization by presenting situations, experiences, and testimony rather than going through the theory at an abstract level. He situates the debate in a wide cultural context, discussing its importance as an historical condition, with examples such as the status of aboriginal people, of those dispossessed from their land, Algerian raï music, postcolonial feminism, and global social and ecological movements. Above all, Young argues, postcolonialism offers a political philosophy of activism that contests the current situation of global inequality, and so in a new way continues the anti-colonial struggles of the past. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.




Responding to Globalization


Book Description

Investigates the Singapore Government's approach to the construction of national identity. This book focuses on the global/national nexus: the tensions between the necessity to embrace the global to ensure economic survival, yet needing a committed population to support the perpetuation of the nation-state and its economic success.




Colonization Or Globalization?


Book Description

This book presents new scholarship on the subject of imperial expansion through colonization and globalization from a variety of postcolonial perspectives. The chapters in this volume, grouped in three sections, scrutinize imperial expansion within the context of national identities and imageries-deconstructing the modernist and utopian idea of a nation as a site of homogeneity, and reviewing the importance of the concept in the different phases of colonization. Hence the first section, entitled Neo-Imperial Traces or Premonitions in Modernism. The postclassical phase of colonialism is examined through the representation of the colonized and the once-colonized. Applying postcolonial theories and often moving beyond them, scholars scrutinize such textual and filmic representations as exemplified in Asia. These make up section 2, Interference of the Imperial Tradition in Asia, which allows for the rearticulations of cultural heritage in the region within the different and ever-renewed schemes of imperial expansion Section 3, Reformulations of the Imperial Project, seeks to explore the questions surrounding inclusion in, and exclusion from, the realm of power as the founding principle of empire, suggesting that they are discursive and deliberate. Postcolonial societies inherit the trauma of colonialism that subjected people to a cultural displacement that is exacerbated by renewed efforts of imperial Influence through globalization. Book jacket.




The Empire


Book Description

History will not be forgotten...or silenced. Darcy's mother may be dead, but that doesn't stop her from trying to warn her that trouble is brewing. For weeks Darcy Adams has been haunted in her dreams by her mother and images of her hometown; past and present. The dreams make no sense until a frantic phone call from her father in the middle of the night confirms what her mother has been trying to tell her. Shoreton is in trouble. Compelled by the desperation in her father's voice and her mother's warnings, Darcy travels across the country to the quaint coastal town she left behind years ago only to find it in a state of upheaval. The state plans to make changes that could doom the town, leaving the residents in a bitter conflict between those who crave progress and those determined to preserve their heritage. Meanwhile Darcy's dreams are becoming increasingly realistic and disturbing. There is more to the problems in town than meets the eye, as unexplainable encounters with strange people begin to occur. While searching for the connection, Darcy discovers a shocking secret confirming her ties to the future of the town, forcing her to delve not only into the town's past, but her own. Faced with a history she thought buried in her past, Darcy discovers that sometimes moving forward means looking back. The ghosts of Shoreton will not be forgotten...or silenced.




Decolonisation and the Pacific


Book Description

This book charts the previously untold story of the mobility of Indigenous peoples across vast distances, vividly reshaping what is known about decolonisation.